“The ability of big business to target and effectively market their product creates a playing field that is no longer level,”

Storefronts would allow sellers almost as much autonomy as they had on their own websites. But by tapping into eBay's millions of registered users, they could solve the problem that had doomed so many small e-commerce sites—finding customers.

EBay outperformed its competitors, Whitman says, because it provided a better user experience. “The reason we were so successful against Yahoo! and Amazon was clearly focus,” she says. “This was our only business.” Whitman liked to say that every morning, she and her staff woke up thinking only about how to make online auctions better, something

But with eBay, registered users had a significant investment in remaining on the site. They had reputations, in the form of Feedback Forum ratings reflecting months, even years, of online activity. If they switched to Onsale Exchange or Auction Universe, they would have to leave those ratings behind.

With millions of buyers and sellers able to participate in every transaction, market flaws that allowed goods to sell for more or less than they should have were being corrected. EBay was now a price-setting mechanism—a stock market for everyday goods.

EBay's success, as Omidyar liked to point out, was due in large part to the fact that sellers went where all the buyers were, and buyers went where all the sellers were. But if aggregators like Bidder's Edge caught on, buyers would no longer go to eBay—they would go to an aggregator. Sellers could put their items up for sale on any site, including

“The financial empowerment you can bring people by giving them access to an efficient market is tremendous,” Omidyar says. “That's what it was all about.”

The first markets arose at crossroads, where traders came to reach the largest number of potential customers. If sales at the crossroads were good, the merchants stored their wares there permanently. If they were the best in the whole region, traders brought their families and settled there. In time, they put up walls and built an infrastructure,

But auctions excel when they are called on to set prices for items whose value is inherently indeterminate. Some of history's first recorded auctions were held at the gates of Rome by soldiers selling off war plunder—used, foreign, and one-of-a-kind goods whose worth was subject to debate. In modern times, land-based auctions have been used mainly